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Please Pay for Your News

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Re: Please Pay for Your News

#11

Post by egonschiele »

SecurityMinded wrote: post #7

News is public knowledge. What you pay is the opinions of the news reporters. I personally have no interest in paying for politically skewed opinions of a pol-sci grad of few years ago. That is why I will never ever subscribe or read any newspaper in print or online. When I acidentally click on a link which takes me to NY Times or LA times or Atlantic titled website, I immediately close it without even perusing the f…

WHAT are you talking about? What makes news public knowledge over anything else? I take it you don't pay doctors or engineers either, because their knowledge is public knowledge too?

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#12

Post by vulcan01 »

SecurityMinded wrote: post #7

News is public knowledge. What you pay is the opinions of the news reporters. I personally have no interest in paying for politically skewed opinions of a pol-sci grad of few years ago. That is why I will never ever subscribe or read any newspaper in print or online. When I acidentally click on a link which takes me to NY Times or LA times or Atlantic titled website, I immediately close it without even perusing the f…

Public knowledge must be compiled, and that requires some amount of work. Whether this work needs to be paid for is up to you.

Further, many news agencies conduct investigations. Perhaps the most well-known of these are the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. By paying for news you also pay to fund their investigations, which may or may not result in newsworthy information.

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#13

Post by egonschiele »

b215826 wrote: post #8

I don't mind paying for news, but almost all news websites would keep track of what I read if I do that, and it's easy to figure out a person's political biases from their reading habits.

I'm curious, how do you get your news in a way that lets you bypass the tracking? Why not continue to get your news that way and just subscribe to ensure the news continues to exist?

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#14

Post by quadrangle »

As difficult as this trade-off for business is, I prefer to financially support journalism that isn't compromising its values by using third-party ads. The journalism that rejects advertising is the virtuous journalism that most deserves our dollars.

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#15

Post by egonschiele »

cxr wrote: post #3

The thing about paid news is that they're offering a "premium" product, but that product has notable omissions. You know what I'd expect from news that you have to pay for? A bibliography. Something like (an idealized version of) Wikipedia, with a list of references included somewhere, each scoped to a particular claim—even if a reference just amounts to original research conducted by the news org. E.g. Interview wit…

So your argument is, since it's not exactly what you want, you aren't going to pay for it.

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#16

Post by egonschiele »

na85 wrote: post #5
nicharesuk wrote: post #4

I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source) My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues: 1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased…

Unbiased news does not exist. To get a good appreciation for the real "ground truth", one must accept bias exists and seek several opinions on a given issue, from different outlets or sources.

Absolutely this. "I'm looking for unbiased news" is a standard line by people who do not read the news.

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#18

Post by egonschiele »

daenz wrote: post #2

If a business has to beg customers to pay, maybe they should step back and re-evaluate the value that they are purporting to offer and the methods with which they are offering it.

You are so right. Charities have to beg customers to pay too. Maybe they should step back and re-evaluate.

Actually, here's an even better idea -- let's just kill the poor. Think of how much money that would save.

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#19

Post by pmarreck »

na85 wrote: post #5
nicharesuk wrote: post #4

I personally would love to pay for my news (in a sense I try to do that by regularly donating to Wikipedia as I think it's a fantastic open-source-esque news source) My trouble is the dearth of non-biased media sources. (Hacker news may be considered biased as it's often skewed for people in tech?) This might just be my inability to trust but I see multiple issues: 1. Presenting facts in any way can be seen as biased…

Unbiased news does not exist. To get a good appreciation for the real "ground truth", one must accept bias exists and seek several opinions on a given issue, from different outlets or sources.

With apologies for gently calling bullshit on this, you're basically saying the following list does not exist. Or you're saying it has "center bias," which is kind of like saying a court has "bias towards its decision". Or you're saying this domain is biased, even though it seems balanced (I've looked into it), an accusation that would of course require evidence:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/center/

There is an objective truth. The closest you come to that, the less biased you are. Not sure what the problem with understanding this is. Values may differ, and you may be including that in your definition of "bias" (for example, WSJ may come at news from a business perspective), but I would personally NOT include values into a definition of "bias" because that then makes "bias" conveniently impossible to define objectively!

Re: Please Pay for Your News

#20

Post by mongol »

I would be prepared to pay per article. I am not eager to subscribe to any particular newspaper. I want to consume media "a la carte", not "all inclusive".

Unfortunately, newspapers wants me to susbcribe and here we are.

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